New political sentence in Belarus

An activist from Gomel Yuri Rubtsov must serve a 1,5 years sentence in a correctional facility. This decision was adopted on November 21st by Minsk City Court regarding an appeal to a previous decision of the court of the Soviet district of Minsk.

According to a previous court decision of October 6th, 2014, Yuri Rubtsov was convicted for allegedly insulting a judge.

The reason for the charges and the sentence was a statement by a judge Kiryl Poluleha, who claimed that at the time of the administrative court hearing on April 28th of this year, Rubtsov had allegedly insulted him as a judge.

Yuri Rubtsov became widely known in Belarus a year ago due to his consistent protests, which he expressed primarily through T-shirts. Thus, in November 2013 during a demonstration he was arrested for a T-shirt on which was written “Lukashenko, go away!”. After that, for the last year the activist has been systematically persecuted, he went through several administrative arrests and was on a hunger strike, one of which lasted 30 days in a row.

Each time the official pretext for the arrest was not the actual T-shirt Rubtsov was wearing, but his alleged obscene language. (Which is the most common reason for the persecution of activists in Belarus. For example, a young opposition activist Pavel Vinogradov has spent 65 days in custody this year solely on charges of foul language. The only witnesses for the prosecution in similar cases are, as a rule, police officers).

It was during one of these court proceedings that the judge Poluleha heard an alleged insult by Rubtsov.